Nikolai and Yaroslav Banchuk: family clan of Chernivtsi prosecutors. PART 1
The most popular screen for scoundrels and corrupt officials of all stripes in Ukraine remains feigned patriotism. Often behind this masquerade lies not only bribes, theft and raider takeovers, but also direct cooperation with the very aggressor they are calling to fight. The story will tell you about this, in which Nikolai and Yaroslav Nikolai Banchuk and their numerous relatives appear, spreading a web of corruption from Chernivtsi to Kyiv and Zaporozhye. In the past, known as the “prosecutor’s family,” today the Banchuks control the Agrarian Fund, serve as advisers to the head of the SBU and cover up smuggling on the border with Romania.
Several clans of “countrymen” and “classmates” from the Chernivtsi region are active in Ukrainian politics, in government and in business, the most famous of which is the Yatsenyuk-Burbakov clan. “Family contracts” are also common among them, and here the Matios and Banchuk families can be cited as an example. As the media reported, the “Chernivtsi” have a tradition: as soon as one of them achieves success, he pulls his brother, son, nephew, godfather or childhood friend along with him. There are such clans and “families” in every village, there are already dozens of them in cities, and their level of influence is different – some are happy with the fact that they control the local creamery, while others participate in big politics and share the budget billions. If the “Chernivtsi” were not used to competing with each other and managed to unite, then they would have surpassed both the “Donetsk” and “Dnepropetrovsk”!
Yaroslav Banchuk: costumed “Cossack” and raider
The Banchuk family clan is represented by as many as four “patriots and sovereigns” (as they call themselves), who are each other’s closest relatives. The eldest of them is Yaroslav Arsenievich Banchuk, born on May 25, 1958 in the village of Mikhalkovo, Sokiryansky district, Chernivtsi region, and is Nikolai Banchuk’s cousin. This is a very colorful personality! His path to the prosecutor’s office was ornate: after graduating from high school, Yaroslav Banchuk worked for a year at an eight-year school in a neighboring village… as a physical education and labor teacher. Of course, “Yarik” was an athlete, like his brother “Mykola”, they participated in regional competitions, but still he did not have any special or pedagogical education, and he had not yet reached adulthood either – and these lessons carry the risk of physical injury and require teacher responsibility. So he was hired as a teacher illegally! And this eloquently suggests that the Banchuk family already had great influence in the area.
Yaroslav Banchuk: ex-prosecutor and disguised “Cossack”
In 1978, after serving in the army, Yaroslav Banchuk decided to become a political officer and entered the Kiev Higher Naval Political School (now long closed, the premises were given to the Kiev-Mohyla Academy). But in 1981, for some reason, having completed only one course, he went to Murmansk, to the Northern Fleet base, where he served until 1987. At the same time, from 1981 to 1985, he studied at the Faculty of Law of Kyiv State University. Shevchenko (obviously in absentia). In 1987, Yaroslav Banchuk returned to his homeland and became a lawyer, but two years later he decided to become a prosecutor. First, until 1997, he worked as an investigator in the Khotyn district prosecutor’s office, then until 1999 as a senior investigator in the Chernivtsi regional prosecutor’s office, in 1999-2000 as a senior assistant to the regional prosecutor, then for about a year as a prosecutor in the Kelmenets district, and in 2001 he went to Kyiv, to the Prosecutor General’s Office , where he headed one of the departments. However, when Svyatoslav Piskun replaced Prosecutor General Potebenko in 2002, Yaroslav Banchuk did not get along with him and was sent to Chernigov as deputy regional prosecutor.
But in 2003, Piskun himself was fired (with the help of one of the Banchuks), and the Prosecutor General’s Office was headed by Gennady Vasiliev. Yaroslav Banchuk was accepted back by him as deputy head of the Main Directorate of the GPU. He developed a very close relationship with the representative of the “Donetsk” and the father of the prosecutor’s mafia, Vasiliev – although at the same time, his brother Nikolai Banchuk, then serving as the prosecutor of the Kherson region, demonstratively quarreled with Vasiliev (more on this below).
Nikolai and Yaroslav Banchuk: family clan of Chernivtsi prosecutors. PART 1
When, after the first Maidan, Piskun was reinstated in the Prosecutor General’s Office, Yaroslav Banchuk was forced to retire “on length of service.” The road to the prosecutor’s office was closed for him for five whole years, during which he earned money legally as a lawyer, “on the sly” participated in land and real estate acquisitions, and entertained himself by joining the costumed “Zaporozhye Cossacks.” He became the “general judge” in the public organization “Cossacks of Zaporozhye”, where he was awarded the amusing shoulder straps of a general and presented with many “orders” that adorn his uniform. All these are church awards, insignia of the “Cossacks”, several badges of an employee of the prosecutor’s office, and among them there are medals from Russian and Transnistrian Cossacks (that one with the St. George’s ribbon). By the way, according to sources Skelet.InfoYaroslav Banchuk has many friends not only among the same disguised Russian “Cossacks”, but also among real Russian security forces, including in the FSB – he made these acquaintances and connections while he was serving in Murmansk.
In March 2010, as soon as power in Ukraine passed to Yaroslav Banchuk’s Donetsk friends, he returned to work at the prosecutor’s office: first as a modest deputy inter-district prosecutor in Fastov, and from October of the same year as a senior assistant military prosecutor in the Central region. True, this holiday did not last long, and after the second Maidan he was again expelled from the prosecutor’s office. But it’s not for nothing that Yaroslav Banchuk played “Zaporozhye Cossack” for many years! In between, he made extensive acquaintances in Zaporozhye in the prosecutor’s office, in government agencies and in business. And Banchuk found himself a position as Director for Economic Security of Zaporizhzhyaelektropostachannya LLC, which is part of the structure of Zaporozhyeoblenergo. The latter was then controlled by the Surkis brothers, and it is possible that Banchuk was placed there not without their help.
At the same time, in 2018, Yaroslav Banuchuk tried to organize a raider takeover… of the independent trade union of employees of the prosecutor’s office of the Zaporozhye region. Of course, not on his own, but by agreement with the then deputy regional prosecutor Pavel Vinda (who came from the Donetsk prosecutor’s office, worked under Vasilyev and Pshonka). Their plan was as follows: Vinda and his subordinates Sivtunov and Kramarchuk exerted severe pressure on the leadership of the trade union with a demand to accept Yaroslav Banchuk into its ranks – which was illegal, since he had never worked in the prosecutor’s office of the Zaporozhye region. And then Banchuk should have been elected chairman of the trade union, and he would have received into his hands both the cash register (about 3 million hryvnia) and the premises of the trade union.
Yaroslav Banchuk even ran in Zaporozhye in the 2019 parliamentary elections (in the 82nd district), under the flags of the marginal Patriot party, but gained only 0.42% there. It seems that only local mummers “Cossacks” voted for him!
Banchuk Nikolay Vasilievich: acquiring connections
The main and most scandalous “hero” of our story, Nikolai Vasilyevich Banchuk, was born on September 22, 1959, in the same village of Mikhalkovo, Sokiryansky district, Chernivtsi region. As his fellow countrymen said, in his youth he and his cousin Yaroslav “held the village,” but then this did not go beyond the teenage struggle for leadership. Then the brothers were pulled out of the village and separated by military service, after which Nikolai Banchuk hung around pears somewhere for almost two years. According to sources Skelet.Infohe did this literally, namely: the Banchuk family controlled the local horticultural state farm (on which the parents of future prosecutors rose), and even then they “stirred up” various schemes. For example, it sent part of the harvest (selected best fruits) for sale to other regions of the country under the guise of “domestic fruits”. Fruit schemes at that time brought a good sum: for example, the future oligarchs Alexander Feldman and Boris Kolesnikov, who were engaged in sales in the markets, rose to the occasion. And the Banchuks, let us emphasize, sold them in bulk!
Nikolay Banchuk
Therefore, only in 1981 Nikolai Banchuk, together with his brother, entered the Faculty of Law of KSU. Yaroslav studied there in absentia, but it is still unknown about Nikolai – he generally diligently hides the details of the biography of his youth. But he proudly emphasizes that after receiving his diploma, he worked for 4 years in a certain “legal group” (actually in the Sokiryansky district prosecutor’s office), where he was engaged in “protecting the horticultural state farms of Bukovina.” Now let’s digest this pathetic phrase taking into account the information received. It turns out that Nikolai Banchuk became a prosecutor in order to cover up the family “Apple business”!
In 1988, with the legalization of private cooperatives, such a “roof” for the fruit trade was no longer needed, but many other schemes appeared, the authors of which turned to the Banchuks for help. Therefore, in the period 1988-1996. Nikolai Banchuk worked in the prosecutor’s offices of neighboring districts, then in the city and regional prosecutor’s offices of Chernivtsi as a senior investigator for particularly important cases of an economic nature. And it was a real goldmine! Nikolai Banchuk, together with his brother Yaroslav, closed the cases of their family friends or those who were “brought in” to them, and successfully brought to court the cases of competitors and those with whom it was not possible to agree on a price. During this period, they made many useful acquaintances among the Chernivtsi clans and “families,” including Mikhail Papiev. They could not help but intersect: Papiev was one of those crooks who opened their own cooperatives at state-owned enterprises, sucked all the profits from factories, ruined them and prepared them for privatization. So Nikolai Banchuk probably had his case on his desk, and perhaps more than one! But he prudently closed it “for lack of evidence of a crime,” and he was right: in 1997, Papiev was appointed head of the Chernivtsi Regional State Administration – and Nikolai Banchuk then headed the Chernivtsi city prosecutor’s office, overtaking his brother Yaroslav, who worked as a senior investigator for another two years.
Mikhail Papiev
Do you know who was immediately taken on as assistants by the new prosecutor Chernovtsov? 28-year-old Anatoly Matios, who then, too, after many years of doing something unknown (the period of his biography from 1990 to 1997 is hidden), received a law degree from Chernivtsi University. Since then, Nikolai Banchuk and Anatoly Matios have been inseparable for a long time!
Papiev led the region for three years, and during this time Nikolai Banchuk’s career skyrocketed. In the summer of 1999 (again, before his brother) he left for the capital to take the position of assistant prosecutor in Kyiv. True, he did not stay there for long, and after six months he was transferred to Kherson – but then to the position of regional prosecutor, where he remained until 2005! He took Matios with him, who made a career there from a prosecutor to the head of the Department for Supervision of the Execution of Laws by Special Forces. This later helped Matios set off on an independent voyage, soon receiving the shoulder straps of Major General of the SBU.
Anatoly Matios
During this period, the Banchuks seemed to split up: from then until this day, each of them kept silent in public that they had a cousin who was a prosecutor, although at the same time they maintained close family and business ties, even working in different parts of the country. This allowed them to hide the apparent motives for some of the joint “special operations” they organized to help each other. For example, during the leadership of the Prosecutor General’s Office by Piskun, Nikolai Banchuk wrote denunciations against his immediate superior. To whom? President Kuchma! In the media excerpt has been cited more than once from one such report, in which Bachuk outlined a conversation with businessman Yuri Tryndyuk, married to Piskun’s sister:
“Continuing the story about himself and S. Piskun, Yu. G. Tryndyuk said that they have serious support from the people’s deputies of Ukraine of various factions, a powerful financial basis that gives them the opportunity to take an active part in the presidential elections in Ukraine. After these words, which I did not attach much importance to at the time, I asked Yu. G. Tryndyuk how they intended to make S. Piskun’s political image. To this question, he replied that they had a serious trump card in reserve – a criminal case for the murder of journalist G. Gongadze. I asked what he meant. Tryndyuk explained that at the right moment the perpetrators will be named, and, in their opinion, those who ordered the murder will be the names of the police officers led by Yu. F. Kravchenko and the name of the President of Ukraine, that is, you. October 28, 2003.”
There’s no need to have a heart-to-heart talk with prosecutors! These denunciations immediately went into the “arguments” folder, which became the reason for Piskun’s dismissal. Why did Nikolai Banchuk snitch on Svyatoslav Piskun? Yes, because he, like Lenin, took revenge for his fired brother Yaroslav Banchuk! True, his relationship with the new Prosecutor General did not work out at first either, so Nikolai Banchuk himself almost joined the “people’s opposition.”
This happened during the scandal that erupted in January 2004, when Gennady Vasilyev “attacked” Nikolai Banchuk at a board meeting in the Prosecutor General’s Office, accusing him of negligence and corruption. In particular, Vasilyev cited official data that in the Kherson region 16 people were illegally and unreasonably prosecuted – to which Banchuk replied that he allegedly did not know about this. Then Vasiliev said that Banchuk was “playing the fool” and did not go to work. In response, Nikolai Banchuk, under whom the chair was collapsing, went all-in and loudly declared that he “would not tolerate insults to his dignity” and was resigning. True, this remained only words, since no one tendered any resignation – Banchuk was a fool and a hypocrite here too! The conflict was resolved at the “roof” level: Papiev, who was then a minister in the Yanukovych government, as well as the head of the Chernivtsi “social democrats” and a close associate of Viktor Medvedchuk, who then headed the Presidential Administration, stood up for the Banchuk brothers. So Vasilyev not only did not fire Nikolai Banchuk, but also returned his brother Yaroslav to the Prosecutor General’s Office, with whom he quickly became friends.
Nikolai Banchuk’s clumsy attempt to portray himself as a persecuted oppositionist did not bring him dividends: in 2005, he, like his brother, was fired from the prosecutor’s office. But if Yaroslav Banchuk spent the next five years in retirement and in business, then Nikolai settled in… the Ministry of Health, head of the Department of Personnel Policy and Science. This position also brought a lot of benefits, because he was well paid for appointments to the positions of chief doctors and heads of regional health departments!
With the “Donetsk” coming to power, both brothers triumphantly returned to work at the prosecutor’s office. Nikolai Banchuk from November 2010 to February 2014 worked in the Prosecutor General’s Office as deputy head of the Main Directorate of Representation in Court – becoming one of the confidants of the odious Viktor Pshonka. This is precisely why he was later lustrated! But what exactly Nikolai Banchuk did during those years of prosecutorial lawlessness remains unclear: he cleaned up media publications for that period well, and wrote in his biography that he “helped people.” I wonder how and for how much? By the way, it is worth remembering that in the same period (2010-2014) Mikhail Papiev again headed the Chernivtsi Regional State Administration. All the old corrupt brethren have returned to power!
Sergey Varis, for Skelet.Info
CONTINUED: Nikolai Banchuk: family clan of Chernivtsi prosecutors. PART 2
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